ST. PAUL, MINN. —The University of St. Thomas is the largest private university in Minnesota, with more than 10,500 undergraduate and graduate students. We are an NCAA Division III school and a member of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Men and women compete in 20 varsity sports, and more than one third of all undergraduate students participate in intercollegiate varsity or club competitions.
Gary Schulzetenberg (L) and Ron Riley pose with the Panasonic-equipped "coaches' cart." During the past year, we've made a large-scale investment in Panasonic video gear, including six AW-HE50S cameras, two mountable AG-HCK10 HD camera heads (POVCAMS), along with five AG-HMR10 handheld AVCCAM HD solid-state recorders. These are our chief recording devices, which are predominantly used in coaching analysis.
GO-ANYWHERE VIDEO RECORDER
The HMR10 handheld recorder is incredibly portable at one-and-a-half pounds, putting the flexibility of recording and viewing high quality 1080 /720 AVCHD content literally in the palm of your hand. This battery-powered recorder can be teamed with the HCK10 Full HD POVCAM to form a point-of-view camera/recorder system. And as it's equipped with HD-SDI in/out capability, the HMR10 can also serve as standalone recorder for any HD-SDI-capable camera.
CAPTURING GAME VIDEO
As we write this, we are coming to the close of a successful football season that took full advantage of the HMR10's capabilities. Two of the HE50S cameras in Panasonic's "cool dome" outdoor housings were permanently installed in the football stadium, one at the end zone and one at the 50-yard line. During practices, the video staff keeps two HMR10s busy in the press box recording feeds from those cameras.
For our "away" games, we've been taking a couple of POVCAMs on the road. At the game venue, we place one atop a telescoping mast in the end zone, while the second one is mounted on a tripod in the press box on the 50-yard line. Again, images from both cameras are captured with an HMR10 recorder. At halftime, we begin to download the captured footage into our coaching software (Hudl from Agile Sports). Within hours (or by the time the team's bus returns to the campus), we have the game fully loaded and tagged for the coaches.
We also use two of the HMR10s teamed with POVCAMs on rolling production systems we call "coaches' carts" that we shuffle among various sports practice venues. Our indoor track and diving programs have gotten plenty of use from these carts. In capturing diving events, we've come up with an innovative implementation in which the POVCAM is outfitted with a wide-angle lens and is turned on its side, recording to the HMR10 located at poolside, and capturing the diver entering the water.
The size, quality and versatility of the HMR10 recorders have helped to transform the way we look at sports video here at St. Thomas. The Panasonic recorder is a perfect fit for our athletics-wide high-definition video operation and lets us record from anywhere in the building. We can take it right to the video source, and, of course, it's ideally partnered with our POVCAMs.
Ronald Riley is production manager and Gary Schulzetenberg is associate director of media services at the University of St. Thomas. They may be contacted, respectively, at rariley@stthomas.edu and grschulzeten@stthomas.edu.
For additional information, contact Panasonic at 877-803-8492 or visit panasonic.com/broadcast.
